Contact Adhesive

Have you noticed how companies and organisations like to alter or replace names and expressions for no apparent reason? I was in Tesco at Skipton last week, and saw for sale some glue. But it was not glue. It was ‘contact adhesive’. Glue, unlike Hoover and Tannoy, is not a registered trademark, so the reason for replacing a monosyllabic word for two words with five syllables is not immediately obvious. In the dear old world of education, headmasters with too much time at their disposal would rebrand and rephrase job titles. I was once Head of Year, but was advised that I was going to be known as a Progress and Development Manager. I left.

Some churches play a similarly pointless game. Rather than call themselves a church or a chapel, they are ‘worship spaces’, 'transformation centres' and ‘spiritual communities’. There is something novel in this, and the imaginative people who come up with these terms must feel suitably gratified. Yet we may re-brand, re-imagine and re-conceptualise all we want; the redeemed people of Christ are His church. If I break a vase, I want plain glue, not some verbiage. If I want to join fellow believers, I want to join a church, not a naff expression of the individualistic, anti-religious and egotistical culture of which I am already part.